AFTER a chequered history, Willington Cricket Club celebrated reaching a 100 not out with a thank you to the league that helped it through its darkest days.

A challenge match against the North-East Durham League was a fitting celebration of 100 years of cricket in the former pit village.

Like many village sides, Willington began as a colliery team and thrived in the early years.

It started at Sunnybrow, before moving to Low Willington, where striking miners built the club a new pavilion, now used as changing rooms, in 1926.

Colliery managers such as RA Howe doubled as club captain and attracted the best players by offering plum jobs.

Present vice-chairman John Coe remembers his father, Jackie, leaving his job at Wolsingham steelworks to join Willington's Brancepeth Colliery, where there was work and a colliery house on offer.

He played cricket and football for his new town, going on to turn out in an Amateur Cup final.

Mr Coe said: "In those days, cricket was a really important part of the social life in places like this. Every community had a team, and there was keen competition between the villages."

Groundsman Alan Hill started watching Willington in the 1930s and first played in 1939.

He said: "Cricket in those days was a character-building game and you played for the love of it."

In 1975, Willington won the Durham County League and took on its first professional, Alan Chapman. But the club came near to folding in its darkest days in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when it could not sustain two teams.

It resigned from the county league but was saved by the North-East Durham committee, which threw Willington a lifeline by offering a place in the third division.

By 1992, the club had become first division champions and fortunes were improving so quickly that in 1999 it was running five teams as well as a thriving junior section.

There is also talk about ground developments.

Secretary Steve Barker said: "Willington Cricket Club has come a long way in the past few years. We can only move forward.